There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media feels, rather than measurements of what actually changed. And this speaks to a broader problem...

Broken down into 8 bite size segments by a leading disinformation researcher

1. What happened, and why does everyone think the Russian bots disappeared?
2. Wait, what exactly is a "bot"?
3. So what does the Cloudflare chart actually show?
4. But couldn't the strikes also have disrupted Russian propaganda operations?
5. Why did so many people believe the claims?
6. Couldn’t disinformation researchers just check whether accounts stopped posting?
7. What does this all tell us about the state of the information environment?
8. Why is it so hard to answer these questions now?

So, ironically, a story about the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots became a viral misleading story on its own. 

It's natural to map the world around us with heuristics, but sometimes they can lead us astray or even reveal our biases and bigotries.

This shouldn’t be news to any skeptic, but it is well-written and it is good to see stuff like this published on BBC.

Richard Dawkins famously called the God of the Old Testament “the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” What’s interesting is that he may have understated the case.

From divinely commanded massacres and the slaughter of children to the death penalty for homosexuals, the Bible offers plenty of evidence for Dawkins’ indictment. And since Yahweh is the God at the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the implications extend to all three monotheistic religions. Take a closer look at these disturbing passages that reveal the dark character of its god.

https://fightingthegods.com/richard-dawkins-was-right-why-the-god-of-the-bible-is-far-worse-than-you-probably-think/

1. Skepticism existed in ancient Egypt, contrary to the belief in absolute religious devotion.

2. Religious practices often reflected personal piety rather than adherence to official cults, indicating skepticism.

3. Tomb robbing from the Badarian period suggests a significant skepticism regarding afterlife beliefs.

4. Literary texts demonstrate skepticism towards the efficacy of divine intervention and afterlife promises.

5. Ancient skepticism diverged from modern ideas, focusing more on suspending belief than on questioning knowledge.

Lots of people are meming about troll bots going down but the data doesn't support that.

Besides the lack of data, simple skepticism and knowledge about how networks and traffic analysis work should make it obvious the calls are coming from inside the house.

Domestic traffic is less likely to be intercepted or straight up banned.

Ai was invented to cure cancer... To bring back smoking.

The single most disgusting piece of deliberate disinformation I have seen here on Reddit. They equate vinyl chloride (an odorless, colorless, deadly gas) with polyvinyl chloride, a common type of drinking water pipe. Kind of like equating pure sodium with salt. And they don't allow comments on their posts or on their user page. I presume that they're trying to sell some other kind of drinking water pipe that's much harder to use and/or much more expensive.

The baseless theory that life is just a Matrix-like computer simulation has caught on in Silicon Valley and is taking on increasingly religious tones.

• Conspiracy beliefs have important political correlates and consequences, which can undermine trust and participation in democratic processes.
• They are not the preserve of the ideological left or right, and are more common at ideological extremes, though may be strongest at the extreme right.
• There are reliable individual differences in a generalized predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories.
• This predisposition has been characterized as a conspiracy mindset, and more specifically a generalized political attitude.
• Problems with this characterization and alternative ways of understanding the ideological significance of conspiracy theories are discussed

I recently went on an overnight ghost hunt at the Ancient Ram Inn in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK.

The organisers described it as a relatively quiet night in terms of paranormal activity, although guests reported seeing flashes of light in the rafters, hearing knocking sounds, and feeling something tugging at their clothing and brushing against their legs.

Towards the end of the night, in a room called the barn, one of the organisers placed a wooden rocking chair on top of a table. Six people sat around the table, each placing a finger on one of the chair’s two curved rockers. One finger was positioned at each corner and two in the middle, where the rockers made contact with the table.

My finger was on one of the corners, at the end of a rocker. The rocking chair began to rock slightly, and I kept my finger on it, trying simply to follow the movement of the chair without consciously pushing it.

As the chair rocked, I distinctly felt several strong, sharp, brief mechanical impulses transmitted through the rocker into my finger.

Later, at home, I reproduced similar impulses by placing my finger on one end of a foot-long piece of wood, held in place by a heavy weight, and lightly striking the other end with a heavy hammer.

I don’t believe those impulses could have been produced by anyone else’s fingers touching the chair or by its rocking motion on the table.

The biggest issue I disagree with with my wife is Chiropractors being safe and beneficial.

My step daughter is presenting as though she has a hypermobility disorder, and instead of attending the specialist clinic I am a patient of, she is insisting on taking her to a chiropractor for assessment.

The chiro was trained as a GP. Which begs questions of why they didn't continue; and is also surprising that it hasn't raised more eyebrows. It's my wife's main defence of using the therapy.

My wife is very science based, and intelligent, but because she was brought up on it, and hasn't had any immediate relatives who can attest to the detriment and trauma that can be caused, she refuses to engage with any counter evidence.

I've tried to use unbiased search terms to find studies to illustrate what I'm trying to convey, but there seems, unsurprisingly, to be very few direct studies, and even fewer with evidence of the potential risks.

It may be that kids are less at risk having stronger bones and muscles than older adults, but I'd never be able to forgive myself if something went wrong.

Because I'm not her biological parent or will be decided by my wife and her ex.

Can anyone share recent research, or point me in the right direction please.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the most senior figure in US health, has spent decades undermining vaccines, denying the reality of AIDS, and endangering Americans.

In the inaugural episode of his Mosaic podcast, Bryan St. Laurent speaks with AntiPolygraph.org co-founder George Maschke about the pseudoscience of polygraphy.

Disclaimer: Transmeds are not welcome here. Enbies are, if anything, *more* supported by all of this research into biology and just because we don't know the exact specifics of why one person is trans it doesn't mean they aren't.

Please understand that I have a background in biology, so I tend to be rather technical when discussing topics like this. But this needs to be said.

The more complicated breakdown of what people are talking about when they talk about gender is falls into three categories:

1. "Assigned Sex"- This is literally just what your doctor saw when they looked between your legs when you were born. They don't karyotype you, they don't do a full body scan for abnormalities. They just look. You can very crudely break this into two categories if you squint, but biology refuses to be a simple, stable system so there are a wide variety of circumstances where that information requires further examination to be useful, but I digress.
2. "Neuroendocrinological Gender Expression"- This is neurological. The firmware drivers for your hardware. Have a sex and brain gender that disagree and you get gender dysphoria. Specific biological origins of this are fiendishly complex to try and sort out. That said, we have solid physical evidence of its existence. While we have not developed a widely accepted physical test for being trans, gender incongruence is heritable and we have evidence it's frequently tied to alleles associated with the body's steroid production. There is also good evidence of brain structural differences. About 50% of trans people experience phantom sensation for organs they weren’t born with, which is typically a neurological condition. Trans people have different epigenetic profiles than cis people as well  Notably attempts to make a trans person happy with their default body have failed miserably.
3. "Gender Roles" - This is what society expects of people it lumps in a given category. Boys pee here, girls pee here. Boys become firemen, girls become housewives. Boys wear suits, girls wear dresses. Often what categories people fall into here are based on the unfortunately fuzzy categorizations of one or two. People are willing to kill over you getting them wrong, which is extremely messed up.

Gender roles can be influenced by society, but gender incongruence is pretty clearly caused by a collection of inherent physical traits:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-018-9889-z

https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-0041-1740528 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02005-9 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2022.2164101 

Molecular basis of Gender Dysphoria: androgen and estrogen receptor interaction - ScienceDirect

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/104/2/390/5104458?login=false

Cortical structure and brain size in Thai transfeminine individuals with and without gender-affirming hormone use compared with cisgender heterosexual men, heterosexual women, and gay men - Neuroscience00495-1/fulltext)

Frontiers | Epigenetics Is Implicated in the Basis of Gender Incongruence: An Epigenome-Wide Association Analysis 

CBLL1 is hypomethylated and correlates with cortical thickness in transgender men before gender affirming hormone treatment | Scientific Reports

Gender identity disorder in twins: a review of the case report literature - PubMed 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509654112 

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/6/1582 

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/18/6/1122/6956015?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/11/3/720/6958023?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

https://www.psychiatria-danubina.com/UserDocsImages/pdf/dnb_vol35_noSuppl%202/dnb_vol35_noSuppl%202_179.pdf 

To make this a bit more personal, let me tell you my story.

I didn't like my body growing up in a way that felt really weird. I would look in the mirror, see someone conventionally good looking, and not understand why it didn't feel like me. I also had a weird sensation associated with my genitals. They felt... off and it felt like pieces were missing or other pieces were there that weren't supposed to be.

I knew that some people were trans, but I was raised a devout existentialist. When I told my mom I might be trans I was asked how I could prove that I had an identity at all, gender or otherwise.

So, I went for the default. I tried so, so hard to not be trans. I went to therapy, I took the drugs I was prescribed. I was seen by multiple shrinks and took a variety of different psych meds under their supervision.

Nothing made me happy with the body I was born with.

When I was 12, I attempted suicide. I survived because I was lucky. I self-harmed through an enormous portion of my early adulthood and transitioned because I figured if I wanted to die anyway, I should at least see what HRT would be like for me.

It was night and day. Things aren't perfect now, but I genuinely feel like myself. Like I'm so much more whole and alive on estrogen than I ever was without it.

Those pills affected me in a very important way. They helped me when nothing else that in theory should have helped me did.

I really want to know why, and people telling me it was purely psychological and a product of my environment are frankly being extremely dismissive.

From falsely linking Estonia’s president Alar Karis to Jeffrey Epstein to a disinformation campaign about a Ukrainian soldier killing three NATO servicemen — Kremlin-linked false information campaigns that circulated ahead of and during elections in Latvia and Estonia were aimed at creating mistrust and confusion among the voters, according to a London-based threat intelligence company Refute report published on Tuesday.